What It Takes to Be Successful in Enterprise SaaS Sales with Splunk

In this week’s latest episode of CRO Confidential, Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and former CRO at Brex, sits down with the CRO of Splunk, Christian Smith.

Splunk is a 20-year-old Enterprise software giant that has accomplished many things — a 2012 IPO, a $28B+ Cisco acquisition in 2023, and $3.7 billion of ARR last year, with a market cap of $25.7 Billion.  

Splunk’s core product is a platform for collecting and analyzing high volumes of machine-generated data. Over the years, Splunk has expanded its offerings through acquisitions and product development. As Christian shares on the pod,  the company’s current customer list includes many notable companies, with 92 of them being on the Fortune 100. A feat!

As Christian’s been the CRO of Splunk for over seven years now, he’s a wealth of knowledge on what it really takes to be successful in Enterprise SaaS Sales.

Together with Sam, in today’s episode, they discuss everything Enterprise SaaS sales including:

• Pipeline health
• Enterprise pipeline generation
• How to create demand in the Enterprise when new business slows
• The pros and cons of a product-led pipeline
• And of course, Customer Success with Enterprise-level customers

So there’s a new member of the $10 Billion ARR Club.

ServiceNow is the enterprise workflow leader that most folks have sort of heard of, but don’t fully understand or know too much about.

It’s because you don’t work in a big enterprise. ServiceNow simply dominates there.

It’s a $10 Billion ARR rocketship, still growing a stunning 27% (!) at that scale, with 1,900 $1m+ customers.  And it’s trading now at an all-time high of $160 Billion, or 16x (!) ARR.  Far, far ahead of the average of 6x today.

SaaStr is the largest community of SaaS executives, founders, and entrepreneurs in the world and we bring them together each year at our flagship event—SaaStr Annual.

If you want leads, you want brand exposure, and/or you want to connect with your customers -- the SaaStr Annual is the #1 non-vendor event in the world.  Period. 

And importantly, we understand how much work "doing a show" is. We have designed the event so you will not just be exhibiting at the #1 event in the industry, but just as importantly, will have constant traffic. 

So we try to be positive on SaaStr — that’s what helps the most.  Showing folks the way, often through tougher times.

But there’s a trend I want to highlight now that we’ll see all across 2024.  And I’m highlighting so if it’s you — you can get a bit of a kick in the arse and go do something about it.

It’s the “NRR Zombie”.

What’s that?  It’s a SaaS startup that basically fell out of product-market fit after the 2021 boom … but has enough revenue and high enough NRR to keep going.

In some ways, NRR Zombies are outputs of the actions of 2023, especially for venture-backed startups.  Everyone had to cut, cut, cut — and was told to cut, cut, cut.  That they had to get to cash-flow positive, because no more money was coming.

And while many couldn’t pull it off, and will go under, a lot actually got there.  They did layoffs and froze headcount.  They cut marketing spend to $0.  They raised prices.  And most importantly, they kept most of their existing customers, even as they struggled to attract any new ones.

So now they are, in essence, NRR Zombies.  They’re at $2m-$20m ARR or so, sometimes more, aren’t losing money, and have 90%-100%+ NRR and relatively stable GRR and logo retention.  So that revenue and cash will keep coming in for years.

But they just can’t get any new customers anymore.

Mine was terrible:

• My more technical co-founder didn’t show up to the meeting.
• The interactive demo didn’t work (a browser bug).
• They asked me about our LDAP integration. At the time, I had no idea what LDAP was. So I didn’t even know how to answer the question.

I had a deck to use, but it was more a VC-pitch type deck and not enough about the product. They asked me to skip the deck.

This was a Fortune 50 prospect and 20+ folks were in the room for the meeting.

We lost the pilot. Even after the SVP before the meeting said he’d make it happen. I blew it that badly.

It was rough.

But I learned. I was never unprepared again.  After that:

• I always had the right team at the meeting.
• I got better at demo-ing myself.  Not relying on someone else to do the demo
• Most importantly, I had to hear the objections first to learn them. Then, you get better.

The next one like this — we closed.

We’re gearing up for our biggest, best-est SaaStr Europa 2024 (June 4-5 in London!) and SaaStr Annual 2024 (Sep 10-12 in SF Bay again!)

As part of that, we’re taking a look back at some of the best sessions ever.  When both of HubSpot’s co-founders came to Annual to share their top learnings with Jason … that was something special.

A look back here.

You quietly, and respectfully, move on.

It can be tempting to want to “do something” when a CEO is seemingly destroying a startup:

• You can take it to the board of directors. This happens a lot, actually.  They may listen. But it’s unlikely they will do anything.
• You can rally the troops. But they aren’t the boss.  In the end, you’ll likely just create trouble.

There’s no good play here other than moving on. The CEO is the boss, until the board decides otherwise. But they’re the boss.

If you don’t think they’re the right boss, find a better place to work.

You may be right. They may be running the company into the ground.  But sometimes, also, it’s hard to see the whole story.

Sometimes no matter how messed up things seem, the CEO the company has is its best current option. Oftentimes, any other alternative is worse.

Bear in mind, yes, you can hide fraud fairly easily.  See the FTX debacle.  And this isn’t uncommon.  But in general, investors and boards of directors have seen a lot of startups struggle.  And they know when they want to keep betting on the CEO.  Even if some of the team is less sure.

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